Google's Activity Dashboard now let's you see who has viewed your files

Have you ever had to collaborate on a project and needed feedback from your team? You prepared the needed documents sent them out and crickets. No feedback.  No nothing.  Wouldn't it be nice to know if the documents were even viewed and who has viewed it? Google Docs now allows you to do just that using the new Activity Dashboard feature. 

This feature shows you who has opened the document from the people you have shared it with. You can also see a time stamp of when they last accessed the doc, giving you the information you need to follow back up with people as need.

HOW TO LOCATE THE ACTIVITY DASHBOARD

1. Open up a document that you shared.
2. Go to the top of the screen and click tools
• A drop-down menu will appear
3. Click activity dashboard at the bottom of the menu
• You will see a running list of people who have viewed your file

The one limitation of this feature is that people have the ability to opt out of their view history being tracked. If this is the case you will not be able to see if someone viewed your file or not. Keep this in mind when using this powerful feature to manage your collaboration.

TIPS TO INCREASE COLLABORATION

To help increase your response rate when you share content in Google the following practices are helpful:

1. Use Notifications: Use the notification feature when sharing a Google Doc. This will send an email to those you are sharing the file with. You can customize the message people receive.
   
2. Be Specific: Be specific in your request. In the notification let people know exactly what action you want them to take on the file and by when. Ambiguity is the biggest culprit when it comes not receiving the desired feedback.
   
3. Address Individuals: Follow up with individuals if needed and when feasible. Address follow up emails to specific people. This helps to personalize the message and drive the likelihood of action. The anonymity of mass emails often allows people to hide inaction.

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Check out the  Maximize Productivity Using Google Drive course for more

How to Select the Right Categories in Organizing Your Information

How to Select the Right Categories in Organizing Your Information

Managing information is about creating convenient categories. When you are organizing your documents or files you have to place them in groups that you can easily remember. Overly complex category schemes are impractical for rapid use. When the pressure is on or when you have to find something in a pinch simplicity is crucial.

Keeping things simple is not such an easy task. You have to fight for simplicity. It's very easy to allow your organizational system to balloon and sprawl into many disjointed categories. Simplicity is difficult because it challenges you to be succinct and efficient. 

Create categories of convenience

Align the categories that you organize your information around with the different activities of your life. This will help ensure your knowledge organization systems are simple and easy to use. 

Create categories based upon major activities. Examples bill payments, contacting, project proposals, marketing.

Of course as the context and activities in your life change so will your organizational scheme. Whether you are using Google Drive, OneNote or a physical file cabinet the categories you create in the form of folders or metadata tags should align with life activities.

Context, context, context is everything

Ok, so it's important to note that there is no "one size fits all "organizational scheme. The context of your life will drive the way you think,, organize and seek to retrieve information.

The more your system aligns with these realities, the easier it is to use. When you achieve life/ system alignment you will achieve an intuitive organizational design. Your life's cues will reinforce your system.

Minimize Stress by Capturing Your Open Loops

Minimize stress by capturing all of your action items and to-do’s in a list. This simple personal knowledge management practice emphasizes getting daily commitments out of your head and into your system. Ultimately this practice will free you from the pressure of trying to remember everything and the dread of forgetting something.

You are never too busy to take inventory of all of your important work.When life starts to feel like it’s spiraling out of control it may be due to losing track of important tasks. This can easily happen if an accurate account is not taken of upcoming urgencies and commitments.

Getting caught off guard wrecks havoc on productivity. Two practices are helpful in avoiding this situation.

1. Capture Your Open Loops in a List
2. Review List on a Daily and Weekly Basis

Capture Your Open Loops

When you capture all of your open loops you are essentially documenting all of your to do’s whether big or small. Regardless of how insignificant an action item is to the conscious mind, the unconscious mind will track it just the same. This can siphon mental energy away from achieving truly important work. Remember if it is on your mind, it should be on your list. David Allen author of Getting Things Done often states that minds are good for thinking of ideas not on keeping track of them. He is a strong advocate of the practice of documenting action items immediately into an external system as they arise.

This basic practice will help you regain a sense of control. You may also notice you are able to sleep better at night as your mind can relax knowing that you have captured all of your to do’s in a reliable system. Review your action lists on a weekly and daily cadence

Once you have all of your open loops captured it’s important that you review them on a weekly and daily basis.

The Weekly Review

Your weekly review is when you audit your to-do lists and plan your activities for the next 7 days. This review will help you ensure you are current on all of your action items and that nothing is falling through the cracks.

If you are familiar with the Agile Scrum methodology the weekly review is similar to the sprint planning session at the beginning of the week. Don’t skimp on the weekly review,  it is the cornerstone of personal productivity. A good weekly review session today will spare you a lot of unnecessary rework and firefighting tomorrow.

It is recommended that 1–2 hours is carved out at the beginning of the week to conduct this session. You may be thinking that you don’t have time for this. I thought the same thing too, however, I found that the 1–2 hours I invested in planning saved me 5–7 hours in avoidable rework and firefighting. Planning makes productivity easier.

The Daily Review

Your daily review is all about getting focused for the day. This review helps you dial in on the 2–3 priorities that you need to achieve. The clarity alone regarding your daily work will provide you a tremendous sense of control and accomplishment. It’s recommended that you dedicate a brief 10–15-minute block of time in the morning to review your priorities. This is similar to the daily stand up in agile scrum.

Next Actions:

1. Capture Action Items Instantly in Your System. Get into the habit of instantly documenting your action items. This basic practice will ensure all open loops are captured.
2. Research a Task Management System. Tools like Salesforce, Asana, Basecamp or Wunderlist are great options that span a variety of price points. Pick something that will let you create tasks quickly.
3. Use Your Task Management System in Meetings. Use your task management system during meetings. Capture changes and notes directly into your system as this eliminates the double handling of information.
4. Use the Mobile App. Most every task management system has a mobile app. Be sure to download. This will increase the access you have to important to-dos.

Relationships are the building blocks of knowledge

"Only a human being can nurture relationships. It has to be done with flair and transparency, and it can’t be done from a script. The memories and connections and experiences of the person in the center of this culture are difficult to scale and hard to replace".

- Seth Goden

Relationships are valuable. We need relationships to create and innovate. Our human connections set the stage for our learning and self-development. Without relationships we would not have access to the vast reservoir of knowledge residing in the minds of our colleagues and co-workers.

Cultivating and preserving relationships is a critical driver in enhancing our ability to get work done.

Knowing who we can seek out to deepen our understanding of a topic is valuable. When we have a connection with that person we are better able to have candid conversations often leading to an increased sharing of knowledge.When you consider that 80% of organizational knowledge resides in the minds of people as tacit insight, it is easy to see how nurturing relationships is key to tapping into this vast resource.

Just as relationships increase the flow of insight, friction and misunderstanding can decrease the flow. Working through this though challenging is worth the effort. With improved relationships comes improved satisfaction and performance.
A few additional thoughts:

• Play the connector. Seek to introduce people. Keep an eye out for potential partnerships that would benefit the organization.
• Connect knowledge resources to experts. When sharing  knowledge resources be sure to attribute the work to the experts that helped produce them. Ensure people know who and where within the organization expertise resides. 
• Play host. Create events for people to meet and share ideas face to face.

Knowledge (retrieval) is Power

"The ability to preserve knowledge is nothing without the ability to retrieve it. Retrieval is power".

The preservation of knowledge for reuse is the backbone of a businesses' ability to compete. Every action we take and problem we solve creates knowledge. Insight is a byproduct of living.

Today we have an array of tools that can capture knowledge the moment it is created. Platforms like Salesforce and SharePoint make it possible to generate reusable documentation as we are addressing business issues.
The trick is how do we find the right information at the right time? The power and potential of knowledge is only realized when it can be quickly retrieved. The value of knowledge diminishes if it is difficult to find.

It is here that having a scheme to organize knowledge is helpful. Categorizing information based upon an agreed hierarchy of  terms is essential. A technical word for this scheme is taxonomy. Taxonomies organize concepts and the terms used to describe them in a consistent manner. It is important to create taxonomies based upon the perspectives and knowledge of the end user. The terms used must make sense to the end user. Terms requiring special knowledge or training foreign to the target audience are not great candidates for inclusion in the taxonomy.

When content is captured it can be tagged with established taxonomic terms known as meta data. Most platforms allow users to filter searches based upon this meta data expediting the speed of knowledge retrieval.

For a deeper dive regarding taxonomies checkout:

• The Accidental Taxonomist

Master Your Gmail Inbox Using Labels

Master Your Gmail Inbox Using Labels

The challenge of today is not the acquisition of information but rather it's management. The more effectively we are able to manage our information the better we are able to manage our world. 

The sheer volume of digital communications we receive on a daily basis makes it difficult for us to stay on top of everything we need to read and retrieve.  

Gmail can help you take back control of our inbox through the use of labels and filter.  Labels are metadata tags you place on emails based on the attributes of the communication. You can also later retrieve information based on these same labels.

Labels are like folders but ten times more effective

Labels not only categorize emails but groups them together based on the keywords applied. Labels function like folders in keeping similar information together but unlike folders, you can assign multiple labels to an individual email. This allows the email to be categorized according to different contexts and retrieved according to varying contexts as well. This flexibility equates to faster information retrieval. 

How to Create a Label

Creating labels in Gmail is pretty easy. 

1. Log into the Gmail website. 
2. Find emails you want to label. 
3. Click the "Labels" button at the top of the page. 
   
4. Type the name of the label you want to create. 
5. Select whether to nest the label under an existing label.
6. Click "Create" to create the new label and apply it to the message.

What Labels Should you Create

So what type of labels should you create? As a general rule, the labels you create should be aligned to specific business cases. You should be able to quickly retrieve the information needed to address typical day to day business situations. With that said your labels generally fall into four categories:

1. People
2. Functions
3. Topics
4. Actions

People

Your people labels should be named after the senders of emails.  This label can help separate the communications of specific people from other correspondence that the person may have been included on or mentioned. Using people labels to retrieve information is a much more surgical retrieval strategy than relying upon a general search only. 

Functions

Function labels are named after:

• departments
• functional groups 
• teams
• groups 

This label will help you retrieve emails based on the department's or groups from which the people who sent them are from. 

Topics 

Topic labels are aligned to keywords that indicate:

• projects
• initiatives
• tasks
• business concepts

Topic labels help your retrieve emails that address the day to day issues facing your company.  

Actions

Action labels indicate the different activities that are associated with an email. Perhaps you tag emails you need to do a bit of research on before responding as "Research". You may even assign labels that indicate the type of follow up desired such as "Call" or "Meet". The core concept here is that action labels should be tied closely to your workflow. 

Automate Your Label System With Filters!

Unless you like manually categorizing every bit of email you receive I recommend automating your labeling system using filters. This approach will ensure that your labeling strategy is applied consistently. Manually maintaining your system will greatly limit its effectiveness as there is a good chance labels will be applied inconsistently. Ultimately you will lose faith in your system and stop using it.

Filters are rules that you configure in Gmail that allow you to automatically assign labels to incoming emails based on specific criteria. This strategy saves you time because you do not have to manually maintain your labeling scheme. You will also be able to more quickly categorize, archive and retrieve emails much more quickly

How to Create Filters 

1. Open Gmail.
2. In the search box at the top, click the Down arrow.
3. Enter your search criteria. 
   
4. At the bottom of the search window, click Create filter with this search.
5. Choose what you'd like the filter to do.
6. Click Create filter.

Through a combination of labels and filters, Gmail allows you to enhance your productivity. In an age of information, mastery of its categorization and retrieval are foundational skills. Without the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time, we cannot hope to be effective. Gmail makes this goal a more achievable one.

Reference

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

https://m.wikihow.com/Create-a-New-Folder-in-Gmail

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

https://flow-e.com/blog/product-announcements/gmail-labels-outlook-folders-from-flow-e/

Process and Habits: Important Parts of Managing Knowledge

“Just do it! First you make your habits, then your habits make you!” 
― Lucas Remmerswaal

Managing knowledge is heavily reliant upon two things: process and habit. By process I mean that new information management practices must be included in our daily practice for them to take root. For example I once oversaw a team that would help clients use SharePoint to manage their data. Much of this work required that my team members engage with their clients from conceptualization to deployment of a project. Due to the interwoven nature of our organization, team members sometimes would work on projects that solved different aspects of the same problem. This would later cause difficulties as the solutions to the problem could potentially conflict with one another or waste human resources as more work was committed to than was required. 

The problem was addressed by integrating additional information sharing practices into our project management process. We switched to a new project management approach (Agile Scrum) that made use of frequent knowledge sharing behaviors. Key defining characteristics of the methodology were collective planning and daily progress updates. These new behaviors allowed the team to spot potential synergies or conflicts between projects prior to work being done. The important thing was that these knowledge sharing practices were part of a formalized process and as a result, new behavioral habits were able to take root.  

Which brings me to my second point, habits are powerful things. They allow us to engage in the world without giving much thought to the day to day actions we take. Habits allow us to conserve mental energy on mundane issues and deal with more complex concerns. Our habits support us without fail all day everyday while remaining on the periphery of our awareness. This characteristic is also the problem with habits. If our habits are not  in alignment with the needs of our environment we experience all sorts of challenges and difficulties that seem to materialize out of nowhere. However through deliberate reflection we can assess our daily habits and align them appropriately. Memorializing effective habits and behaviors into a process will ensure that we sustain our new direction until environmental changes require we refine our approach.   

4 Tips On Trust Building

“The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.” 

― Elizabeth Gilbert

Trust building is a steady and deliberate process. There is not a quick path to establish trust with people.  Trust  is developed as a result of consistent and visible action. Building trust requires that we are mindful of our behaviors and that ALL of  our actions influence the "trust" quotient that characterizes our relationships. A few things to consider in creating an environment of trust in your organization and team: 

 IDENTIFICATION:

Identify the important behaviors and expectations in your relationships. Clarity regarding the ground rules to a relationship helps to ensure appropriate follow through occurs. If we do not specifically determine what we base the trust in our relationships upon we cannot truly determine the reason we may feel our trust has been violated. We  are left with an ambiguous sense of disatisfaction with the state of affairs.

BE CONSISTENT:

Follow through on the agreed upon expectations. Consistent follow through is like making a deposit into a bank account. The more we follow through the greater the trust balance is in our relationships. Failure to follow through on commitments is like making a withdrawal from our trust account. This balance will be in a constant state of flux.

 BE VISIBLE:   Being visible with adherence to our commitments can be as simple as a follow up email after completion of an agreed upon task. Subtle but deliberate follow up is a way reaffirming the expectations we have agreed upon as a group. The bottom line is that actions are a great teaching tool and communicate more powerfully than words.

BE ACCOUNTABLE: Part of being accountable means that we are open and own our shortcomings if we break trust with people. It means that we affirm our commitment, make amends and take steps to repair the damage done. Being accountable also means that we are honest with people when their actions have damaged trust with us. Alerting people regarding our feelings provides them a chance to course correct. It reinforces transparency, an important component of creating an environment of trust. 

There many models to nurturing trust within relationships. These are a few practices that I found to be helpful. What practices have worked for you? I would like to hear from you.